There has been a long discussion happening at Gideon’s blog about pacificism, just war theory, the current action in Iraq, and faith. While I find myself pulled toward the pacificist position, I’ve yet to read enough to formulate an informed position on the matter. Currently in the reading hopper are essays by Stanley Hauerwas and Dietrich Bonhoeffer‘s Cost of Discipleship, and the next gathering of our church’s philosophy “club” will focus on the just war theory and pacificism. I’ve been thinking about these questions:

1. Pro-war advocates generally see armed conflict as a way to administer justice. The war in Iraq is good because the Baathist leadership was cruel and unjust to the citizens of that country.

Understood.

But what about Sudan? The U.S. has called the government’s actions there “genocide,” yet our leaders have allowed the discussions to languish in the United Nations. Where’s our sense of justice here?

2. Caleb Stegall, in the discussions on Gideon’s site, advocates the need for the understanding of the amoral space that war and the administration of justice reside within. While I tend to agree with the premise of Caleb’s argument (both just war theorists and pacificists are looking for morality in a place where none will ever exist), his conclusions make me shiver a bit:

It strikes me that neither the right nor the left understand (or admit) that war takes place in an amoral space where civilized people bound to moral codes must behave immorally. For this, both are contemptible. True pacifists have integrity, as do the Colonel Kurtzs and Jessups. But their integrity is cut from the same cloth; that is, from a general denial of the tragic nature of life and order. Both are intolerable because neither can face up to a reality in which violence must be done, but civility–the conditions of being human–must not be annihilated in the process. It is unfortunate that the neo-con/neo-just-war advocates are our best hope for a new martial class and code (which has to be unabashedly masculinist and patriarchal) that aims to produce civilized killers who are willing and able to risk–and often sacrifice–their humanity so that we can have ours. However, as should be apparent to anyone listening to Bush/Neuhaus/Novak/etc, just war theory is just as entangled in the pursuit of moral purity as is pacifism. The truer martial traditions from Augustine to Washington to Lincoln knew “just war” was not just or moral by any ordinary definition.

3. It’s my understanding that we are called by God to be counter-cultural. We are to think and act differently than the rest of the world. Pro-war types often argue that Christian pacificists in the United States can say this only because we have armed police officers protecting our right to be counter-cultural. Historically, however, we see Christians working non-violently in rather counter-cultural situations, more often than not effecting the change they desired.

Posted on 6 June 2005